El mal del alma

-¿Que puede ser eso?- Preguntó, asombrado, el padre Brown.

-¡Ah!- dijo Flambeau, riendo-. Es una nueva religión, una de esas religiones nuevas que le perdonan a uno sus pecados asegurando que nunca los ha cometido. Creo que es algo como la llamad ciencia cristiana. Un tipo llamado Kalon ha alquilado el piso que esta encima del mío. Debajo tengo dos mecanógrafas y arriba ese charlatán. Se llama así mismo el Nuevo Sacerdote de Apolo, y adora al sol.

-Pues que tanga cuidado- dijo el padre Brown-; porque el sol fue siempre el más cruel de todos los dioses. Pero ¿qué significa ese ojo gigantesco?

-Tengo entendido -explicó Flambeau- que, según la teoría de esta gente, el hombre puede soportarlo todo, siempre que su espíritu sea firme. Sus dos símbolos principales son el sol y el ojo alerta, porque dicen que el hombre enteramente sano puede mirar al sol de frente.

-Un hombre enteramente sano- observo el padre Brown - no se molestaría en eso.

-Bueno eso es lo que yo sé de la nueva religión -prosiguió Flambeau-. Naturalmente, se jactan también de curar todos los males del cuerpo.

-¿Y curaran el único mal del alma? -Pregunto con curiosidad el padre Brown.

-¿Cual es? -dijo el otro sonriendo.

-¡Oh! pensar que está uno enteramente sano y perfecto -dijo su amigo.


G.K. Chesterton -El ojo de Apolo
El padre Brown, Relatos completos.

Cuartos cada vez mas pequeños

Sucede con estos pecados que van abriendo sucesivamente las puertas del infierno, e internándonos en cuartos cada vez mas pequeños. Este es el principal argumento contra el crimen: que aunque el hombre no se haga mas malo, se va haciendo cada vez mas debil.

G.K. Chesterton - La espada rota
El padre Brown relatos completos

I can believe

Its not easy to believe.

"I" she told him, "can believe anything . You have no idea what I can believe."

"Really ?"

"I can believe things that are true an I can believe things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter bunny and Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and mister Ed. Listen--I believe that people are perfectibility, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkled lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle an want our water and our women. I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone's asses. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state. I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big ones comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we´ll all be wiped out by the common cold like the Martians in War of the Worlds. I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman. I believe that mankind´s destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumblebee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries an oversees everything I do. I believe in an inpersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says that sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie bach and enjoy it." She stopped, out of breath.

-American Gods, novel by Neil Gaiman